Conventional hearing aids use a microphone to detect ambient sounds and a loudspeaker to send sounds into the ear canal to help patients hear when their ears are damaged or otherwise compromised. However, sounds from the loudspeaker may reach the microphone, causing acoustic feedback issues. Also, such hearing aids direct sounds to the ear through the natural conductive pathway (that is, through the ear drum and to the middle ear bones that vibrate fluids in the cochlea). Consequently, conventional hearing aids are inadequate for certain types of hearing loss caused by physical or genetic ear damage. Moreover, conventional hearing aids or commercial hearing devices suffer from smearing of temporal and spectral information that occurs when amplifying specific frequency bands of sound features to overcome deficits in hearing or for subjects listening in noisy environments interfering with those specific sound features.